Saturday, 21 February 2015

In this post, I'd like to share some activities I did with my students when we were discussing the movie "The Pursuit of Happiness".1. A quote walkabout. Before the class, I printed out the quotes about persistance and positive attitude to life's challanges and put them on the walls in the classroom. As the class began I asked the students to walk around and read the quotes to find one (or more) that they think illustrates the main message of the film. After they'd studied all the quotes and got back to their seats they explained their choice.2. Useful vocabulary. Before the discussion, I presented some expressions taken from one of the film reviews. These expressions help students talk about main events and concepts shown in the film.

3. A Question Marathon. Students answer the questions, agree or disagree with their classmates, share their ideas and feelings. Questions are mainly taken from this blog.

1. What
happens in Chris Gardner’s life to make him and his son become homeless?

2. Did the
events appear to you to be the result of someone’s fault, poor decisions, or
just a sequence of events?

3. What
would be different for Chris in this same situation if he didn’t have his son,
Christopher, to care for?

4. What
appears to be the most difficult aspect for Chris and his son as they use
emergency shelters?

5. What do
you think keeps Chris going when he hits ‘bottom’ in the despair of his
situation?

6. What do
you think would have happened to Chris and his son if he had not been the
intern selected for the job?

7. Explain
how Chris felt at the beginning, middle, and end of the story.

8. Select
parts of the story that were the funniest, saddest, happiest, and most
unbelievable.

9. Select
an action of one of the characters that was exactly the same as something you
would have done.

10. Take a
look at the picture. What scene from the film is this quote connected with? How
can you interpret it?

Wednesday, 18 February 2015

In my previous post, I shared a task I had designed for my students to have them use web-tools for exploring and learning vocabulary. However, I believe it would be incomplete without sharing the outline of the class I'd had with them prior to giving them the assignment. This outline was published in our class blog, so at the beginning of the class my students would open it to follow the instructions.

THE CLASS ON USING VOCABULARY WEB-TOOLS

Online dictionaries

Open these links to online dictionaries and look up the meaning of the same word using both of them:

Saturday, 14 February 2015

When I was to design a vocabulary course I decided I would take advantage of web-technologies and the opportunities they provide for language learning. In some of my posts (here and here), I was trying to put together a list of approaches and tools that appealed to me. Now, that I've covered half of the way, I feel like sharing some practices I've applied, especially that they proved to be working for my students. Therefore, I'm going to present the tasks they had to accomplish in their blogs. Blog Assignment:

In your post “Vocabulary Sci-Fi”, you will be addressing your peers from the past (20-30 years ago) explaining to them what opportunities you have today to learn English. Apart from that you will have to incorporate these elements in your story:- choose a word (from Unit 1 in Upstream) to make a word map (graphwords.com) and insert the picture in your blogpost.- Use another word to look up the collocations in “just the word”, create a word cloud (wordle.net) and insert the picture in your blogpost.- Choose one expression to find example sentences infraze.it, limit your search to the topic of “Education”. Choose one sentence to see the source article and copy one paragraph. In this paragraph, highlight several collocations that you found interesting. - Choose 10 words/expressions from the text “The theatre for the deaf” (p. 14-15.) to create a flashcard set in Quizlet (quizlet.com). Paste the link in your post.Here are some posts by my students with the task described above:AllaRuslanaMaria

Wednesday, 11 February 2015

Earlier today, a former student of mine asked me if I could recommend some sites where her teenage friend could practice grammar. As a result of "digging" my Scoop.it pages I came up with quite a comprehensive list. So, here you go!